Semper Fee

Semper Fee, set in an old-line Boston law firm, is a ribald comic novel about greed, infidelity, betrayal, and worse. Unfolding through two distinctive first-person narratives, the novel explores the entwined but wholly different lives of two partners, Andrew Millard and Eliot Lawrence, rivals since childhood.

In their differing ways, the covetous Millard and Eliot, the aging Eagle Scout, betray or simply take for granted the women for whom they’ve so strenuously competed. However, it is the women who advance and deepen the narrative, delighting, tormenting, illuminating, and invariably controlling the two men. Essential to the lives of both are the incomparable Clare Lawrence and her subversive daughter, Ceci.

Semper Fee lays bare the joys and humiliations of desire and tallies the cost of choices made or not made by its two central characters in a claustrophobic universe of unsavory shenanigans.

Retroland

Retroland is an illustrative look back at the lifestyle and popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s Britain with a humorous twist. From fashion to music, television, toys, computer games and more – dive in, have a laugh and roll back the years with this collection of cartoons.

Reincarnation For Beginners

Happiness is all about being who you want to be and believing in who you think you are. In the plot of Reincarnation for Beginners, there are brave souls who pursue this goal no matter what others may think or say about them!

In this story there are those who reinvent themselves or actually believe themselves to be Elvis, Gandhi, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and Marilyn Monroe.

This book is a revolution of a read. Go on the march brothers, sisters, and everyone else. Find yourself and then flaunt it!

Perhaps a Jealous Foe

The action begins in 2000 with Louise looking at her past. Then it moves back to 1970, where Louise has everything a contemporary woman could ask for: a loving husband, two children, a beautiful home, a good social life. The family is comfortably off, and while her life is circumscribed by her domestic duties and her involvement with the church, she is content with her lot.

Then, she meets Nicholas, and everything changes. While Nicholas makes his attraction to Louise obvious from the outset, he is apparently as conventional as Louise and too inhibited to proceed with more than flirtation and verbal innuendo. 

The relationship between Louise and Nicholas develops slowly, because of the lack of opportunity, and because Nicholas seems unable to make up his mind what he really wants. When they finally make love, all is not quite as Louise had expected. Nicholas eventually also admits to the secret in his past which Louise has discovered by chance.

The story reaches its climax in a night of passion in which Louise, changes her mind, and exults in having finally got the man she loves so much.

Finally, the story returns to 2000, where the aftermath of that night is revealed.

Nothing Personal

Deemed ugly by her mother, who walked out on her at birth, Cypia was brought up by her father, who adored her.
Used and abused in her teens by people who should have loved her, the twists and turns of her life had brought her to this.
Having suffered from anorexia her whole life, she felt so much guilt for things she had no control over.
She realised that she couldn’t change the past, no matter how hard she tried.
But given one last wish, she wanted to be re-united with the children she hadn’t seen for 42 years, had loved her whole life and would till her last breath.

Mykonos and Athena – A Furry Tale

Harry Parkman is a high-flying management consultant with an apartment in Chelsea and a beautiful girlfriend who wants to marry him. His life trajectory seems fixed until he finds two desperately sick kittens whilst holidaying in the Greek Islands. Having spent a lifetime avoiding cats because of a childhood allergy, he cannot leave them for dead. Harry saves the kittens and in so doing, embarks on a journey that saves himself.

A heart-warming adventure for anyone who has loved a pet more than people.

Making Old Bones

Gramwell Glade is Making Old Bones.

A care home, purpose built around a Georgian folly castle façade in Essex, Gramwell Glade is making a fortune for business developer Akin Akindele who, armed with an MBA foresaw that high end care homes were going to return significant returns on his investment.

It’s Making Old Bones of Pauline Graves’ career since moving from hospitality to head up the staff at Gramwell Glade and putting her misplaced hopes in a liaison with Akindele.

It’s Making Old Bones of the dedicated carers who support its sundowners while supporting their own families on the small fiscal returns their efforts bring on the ‘living wage’.

It’s laying old bones to rest. For many of the residents their time at Gramwell Glade is their first experience of surrender when it comes to real life responsibilities. That onus now falls to their ‘children’ who now have their parents’ Powers of Attorney and who are handing over the funds that would otherwise satisfy a mortgage sufficiently large enough to buy their own castle.

If we know someone who works in the care sector or spends their twilight years in a home, if we visit family or friends who have moved on into residential care, make no bones about it, something like the Gramwell Glade experience could come to us all.

Mabel Murphy

It’s 1920s London and the world is in a deep economic depression. Times are very hard and the city is rife with unemployment, poverty and disease. One family in East London
have managed to keep themselves afloat, housed and fed, despite having one parent with a long-term mental health condition, but that is all about to change as their teenage daughter is catapulted into a series of life events which are traumatic, heartbreaking and shocking but which make her become a much stronger and more resilient human being than she ever dreamed possible.
This is a harrowing story of innocence, shame, hostility and vicious cruelty from the very people who should be caring for those in need, but it is tempered with love, hope and the potential to change one’s situation given the right opportunities.
Although fictional, this was a true story for many women of that time and is based on several older women whom the author met and supported whilst an NHS nurse in the large hospital system.

Laura's Year

In January 1976, it is an excited, but nervous family of four who board a Jumbo jet, to leave England to begin a new life in a small town, on the Persian Gulf in Iran.

Adrian, an ex-Royal Naval Officer, thought this new job in Iran would be a chance to earn big money, and although neither parent had wanted to disrupt their children’s education, they thought it was worth the risk, giving them both valuable life experiences, and a chance to see ‘something of the world.’

Once settled in their new home, with the children happily enrolled in an excellent international school, they immediately made friends with like-minded ex-pats, and got involved in an active and well-established social scene, with parties and functions most weekends, and daily trips to their ‘club’ in town, which housed a bar, and swimming pool.

Caroline and Alex, having made friends at school, as well as with some local children, who lived in mud huts, in the desert at the end of their road, also seemed happy with their lot, but Laura becomes pregnant, which threatens to disrupt their idyllic lives, and events that followed, appear to have changed Laura’s, once devoted and loving husband’s feelings towards her.

But, had Laura changed? And that was why her previously, caring husband didn’t fancy her anymore.

How was she to get their relationship back on track, when there were so many exciting distractions and choices which held his attention, which didn’t include her?

Imaginary Order

Mothers: for nine months we are one, yet they remain a part of us, not apart from us, forever.

Told through the eyes of her daughter, Nani, Imaginary Order is the story of a mother’s psychological struggle to regain her life after a near fatal-accident. Their journey together, first to Switzerland, then Italy through to Amsterdam morphs into a redeeming story of self-discovery, independence, and the inevitable severing of the eternal child who hides within us all. 

How to Escape from Hell

How to Escape from Hell: Studies & Interpretations of the Afterlife explores one of humanities most important questions, “What happens when we die, what is Hell, and am I going there?”

A near-death experience (NDE) is a profound personal experience associated with death or impending death. It is estimated between 4 to 15% of our entire global population experience an NDE. This equates to around 20 million people in the US, 50 million in Europe and 100 million in China. Only a small fraction of these experiences are ever reported. Of these reports, a small but notable number report the horrifying and graphic realm of Hell and demons.

Are you destined for Hell? If you are, what can you do about it? If you find yourself in Hell, how do you escape? Through extensive research of thousands of witness accounts, we will find the answer together.

Held

A love story spanning decades as two men not only fight the world for their love and its changes surrounding them but also one another while they battle the one thing that tears them apart.

At the tender age of fifteen, Matt and Justin instantly fall in love. While time grows and matures, so do they and their relationship. Years pass and are torn from one another as their lives take them in separate directions. The political and social constructs start to define their lives and the people who they become.

Can what we believe holds us, end up being our own destructive force, potentially being the one thing that destroys us, crumbling our lives?

Eventually, we all have to let go.